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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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how can you pluck it? Plucking it means destroying it, killing it -- it is murder! Nobody has thought about Tennyson's poetry as murder -- but it IS murder. How can you destroy something so beautiful? But that's how our mind functions; it is destructive. It wants to possess, and possession is possible only through destruction.
Remember, whenever you possess something or somebody, you destroy something or somebody. You possess the woman? -- you destroy her, her beauty, her soul. You possess the man? -- he is no longer a human being; you have reduced him to an object, into a commodity.
Basho looks carefully, just looks, not even gazes concentratedly; just a look, soft, feminine, as if afraid to hurt the nazunia.
Tennyson plucks it out of the crannies and says: ... I HOLD YOU HERE, ROOT AND ALL, IN MY HAND, LITTLE FLOWER.... He remains separate. The observer and the observed are nowhere melting, merging, meeting. It is not a love affair. Tennyson attacks the flower, plucks it out root and all, holds it in his hand. Mind always feels good whenever it can possess, control, hold. A meditative state of consciousness is not interested in possessing, in holding, because all those are the ways of the violent mind.
And he says: LITTLE FLOWER.... The flower remains little, he remains on a high pedestal. He is a man, a great intellectual, a great poet. He remains in his ego: LITTLE FLOWER....
For Basho, there is no question of comparison. He says nothing about himself, as if he is not. There is no observer. The beauty is such that it brings a transcendence. The nazunia flower is there, blooming by the hedge -- KANA -- and Basho is simply amazed, is struck to the very roots of his being. The beauty is overpowering. Rather than possessing the flower, he is possessed by the flower, he is in a total surrender to the beauty of the flower, to the beauty of the moment, to the benediction of the herenow.
LITTLE FLOWER, says Tennyson, IF I COULD BUT UNDERSTAND.... That obsession to understand! Appreciation is not enough, love is not enough; understanding has to be there, knowledge has to be produced. Unless knowledge is arrived at Tennyson cannot
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